It started two years ago as a fundraising luncheon, sponsored by the United Way Women’s Council as a way to raise awareness of the issues facing low-income women in the community.
That first “Women Who Rule” featured women leaders in various executive and professional positions sharing stories behind their accomplishments and answering questions in an informal Q&A format. It was an instant hit, selling out well before the event and overflowing the meeting room at the Westin Savannah Harbor.
The enthusiasm hasn’t waned as the third annual luncheon filled the Westin’s ballroom with a mostly female audience coming together to be motivated and inspired by four local leaders considered trailblazers in their fields.
Kay Ford, Savannah market advisory board chair for BankSouth, recently retired as president and CEO of SunTrust Bank after 41 years in the business.
“When I started out in banking, the only jobs available for women were secretary and teller,” she said. “To really put it in perspective, when I was pregnant with my first child, they made me work in the vault. I could not be seen because I was ‘p.g.’
“I literally couldn’t be in the public eye.”
Assistant Chief of Police Julie Tolbert could match those stories.
“When I started in this job in 1981, there were very few women in the department,” she said. “This was a traditionally male, paramilitary organization and most of the men felt they were much better at the job and didn’t really want us there.
“So, when we would get calls that they felt might require some physical exertion, they had certain codes they used among themselves. They would tell the female officer to ‘disregard,’ which was code for the closest male officer to respond instead.”
The department’s first female officers had to work hard to prove themselves, she said.
Tolbert’s moment of truth came when she was responding to an armed robbery call with a male officer.
“We spotted the two suspects shortly after the call came out, stopped the car and immediately gave chase. What was strange to me was that my partner was a big guy, yet he went after the smaller of the two, leaving me to run down the suspect who was over 6 feet tall,” she said to laughs.
Tolbert got her man, despite being shot at several times.
“After that, I had ‘street creds’ and got a little more respect.”
Paula Kreissler, director of healthy living and community development for the YMCA of Coastal Georgia’s Healthy Savannah, has been a trailblazer all of her life, starting out as the first female courier for FedEx in Houston.
“So did the men load your boxes?” asked panel moderator Meg Heap.
“They did not,” Kreissler replied.
“In fact I learned later that they had been taking bets on when — not if — I would quit.
“Of course, what they didn’t know was that I grew up on a dairy farm, working 365 days a week, often behind the hay baler,” she said, smiling. “I could catch 100-pound bales of hay and stack them up all day long, so FedEx was really no problem.”
Panelist Kate Taylor’s trailblazing involved “the scariest thing I ever did — quitting my job.”
A technology project manager for the second largest privately held software company in the U.S., Taylor took her high-powered, high-stress life 180 degrees in 2011, moving from California to Savannah and founding Savannah Power Yoga.
It wasn’t an “ah ha” moment as much as a gradual transition that led Taylor to her decision.
“When I was working in the software industry, it was pretty intense — 60 hours a week, high expectations, high stress,” she said. “So I started doing yoga to help with the stress and discovered I really loved it.”
It took a while for Taylor to decide to open a yoga studio, even after she had left her job.
“I didn’t want to take this thing I loved and ruin it by making it a career,” she said.
As different as the four women are in career choices, all agreed that, in any profession, women need to have each other’s backs.
“Men do it; women often don’t,” Ford said. “That needs to change.”